The African Burial Ground

to those who built Manhattan



everything depends
upon

the black en-
slaved

paved with lash
scars

beneath the white
money



20/05/03
First published in Orbis May '04
Shortlisted for Montreal Poetry Contest 2015


I don’t usually expand on my work, but for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I’m inclined to make an exception in this case. It’s one of my favourite pieces.

In short, I was inspired by a fascinating documentary on the recently discovered African burial ground in Manhattan. It seemed a really good tool to highlight the ridiculousness of society’s attitudes to race and immigration, underpinned as they are by flawed ideas about who ‘belongs’ and who’s an incomer. I was excited by the physical presence of remains showing people of African origin to have been in the US from the very moment Europeans were.

This I collided with the iconic William Carlos Williams poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’; kind of an American poetic institution:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Williams’s writing is textbook perfection - delicate juxtaposition of detail; first line emphasizing the importance of the precisely focussed image; the mirroring of the wheelbarrow’s actual use in the language; the line breaks controlling how we see the scene, mimicking the manner in which our brain attends visually, etc. ¹

However, I have reservations about the brand of realism showcased in this type of work. I admire the virtuosic precision, which appeals to my own slightly autistic tendencies, but I am wary of an inherent self-referential vacuousness. Poetry that is about poetry. Or even writing that is geared purely to show how well you write, when what is written - the content - is weightless. It’s a concern that pops up with regularity in my work (Malkovich, Real Big Poems, and Behind the White Picket Fence immediately come to mind) and also dovetails with my further post-structuralist worries regarding language, communication, and epistemology (poncy language aside, that’s a wee mission statement for another day!).

I am aware that I am consistent in my inconsistency. I am so seduced by ideas and conceptual celtic knots. I take such pleasure in the craftsmanship of a philosophy - how is it rendered? How have they subverted the medium with which the idea is transmitted? How beautifully is it expressed? How many layers of the onion can I peel? That is what has always delighted me in writing, and in intellectual pursuits. It’s like a game. But it is belied by a nagging anxiety I can’t ignore - is there substance? Is there a wisdom that can be revealed in this manner, or do we beaver with language and concept in a universe that is frustratingly parallel yet never intersects. In truth, I have come to suspect that all art is only ever about its creator and art itself and, as artists, strive as we might to communicate actual content, we can only fool ourselves in this regard. What I put into the world may be a political piece on racism - what the world receives can only be an attitude to politics and to art, embodied in an offering.

Thus, in this poem, I attempt a little artistic rebellion against my own reluctantly-held belief, and deceive myself that I make a meaningful point. (I do keep writing my futile little poems with tragic disregard that they can’t escape their medium and limitations. But how else am I to speak to you?)

Anyway - the poem references the Williams word for word, taking the same degree of precision and accuracy, a respectful pastiche, but with the (attempted? deluded?) addition of meaningful content outwith the self-referential context of writing, making the political point about African American ‘belonging’ (as well as expressing the wider concerns about the nature of art and poetry expressed above).

(I find the above process of expressing these kind of ideas longhand tortuous and painful. I still have to miss out a lot. And at the end I realize how dismally my inarticulate prose fails at communicating. Is it any wonder I express myself in poetry? I can distill worlds of complexity to a tiny near-perfected nugget, just as the ideas are in my head, before I bastardize them by rendering to a communicable medium. The problem is, unless I build a window and explain one from time to time, I suspect they’re hopelessly opaque to you, the world of minds at large...)



¹ nods to Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams, whom I am sure I must have paraphrased here.




Here’s the gist of the documentary about the recently-discovered African burial ground in Manhattan:

Most people are unaware of the city’s history of slavery, and the discovery of the burial ground hightlighted that this wasn’t just something that happened in the South, and not just on the plantations, but in the North, and in the city. The black presence in NY goes back right to the very beginning, indeed to before it was NY. They were there building a society and were essential in building the economy.

Many black people are made to feel as if they have no roots in NY, or N America. In fact they were here from the start; they were the early builders of many US cities. Ironically, the first immigrant to the shores of Manhattan was a black slave, dropped off by the Dutch to claim the land (it became New Amsterdam).

It was, from the beginning, built for profit. The Dutch West Indian Company came to trade for furs. The marshy wilderness was hard to cultivate and labour was in short supply, so they imported slaves. Black slaves working for the Dutch West Indian Company could be granted freedom when they had worked for 20 years, or they could gain it by fighting against the Indians – then they were given a small plot of land. For a period of time there was a small population of free black people. However, the British soon put paid to that when they took control (rebranding the city New York), requiring the slave trade for their expanding empire.

The sheer number of slaves in NY made their masters nervous. This fear led to the slave codes, which were laws designed to control every aspect of a slave’s life. One of the harshest of these laws forbid enslaved Africans to be buried in the graveyard of Trinity Church in Manhattan (even though they had built it!). This was when the African burial ground was established. The enslaved Africans could not hope for freedom through Christianity, either. The Colonies were always debating whether slaves should be baptized. Some felt that if they were read the ‘right passages’ of the bible this would be a good thing – they could be encouraged to obey their masters. Others felt that reading the bible may be problematic – what if they stumble across the story of Moses? There was much legal debate about this in the 1670s-90s. Eventually it was written into law that the baptism of a slave did not alter their status. By baptising them, you were not making them Christians, but ‘Christianizing’ them – teaching them about the role of Christianity, yet they could not partake of it. There was now the situation whereby white Christians could own black Christians as slaves. (Note that Christianity is not the distinguishing element here – it is not religion but race. And gotta love self-serving legal semantics: ‘Christianizing’, indeed!)

Under the Dutch, slaves could work their way to freedom, be granted land, and even be buried in Dutch churches. But under the English, slavery became institutionalized, and outlets to freedom were blocked.

By the late C18th, almost half the white households in NY had slaves. Then came 1776, the American revolution, and the Declaration of Independence. It speaks of freedom for all Americans – all Americans except slaves, that is. Jefferson said “All men are created equal”, but what he meant was that he believed in equality for white men.

Black people were caught up in the war from the very beginning. The British were quick to offer slaves their freedom if they would fight for the king. George Washington, the commander of the patriot forces didn’t want black in his army. He noticed whites and blacks mixing together as soldiers in the opposing forces and could not accept this. He pushed for congress to ban blacks from the military. As the war went on, Washington’s objections were overtaken by the desperate need for manpower – freedom was on offer to any slave who joined the patriot cause. So there were blacks fighting on both sides. Washington’s decision to let black men join up was an important tactical turning point in the war – the patriots began to take the upper hand. Without black soldiers, Washington would not have won the war.

Slavery ended in NY in 1827, after the brutal civil war. The African burial ground had continued to be used until 1792. By the early 1800s, the cemetery was lost under the new metropolis and the black community was pushed further North to Harlem. There are no monuments to the people who built this city. There are statues of George Washington, and the founding fathers, and early white settlers, etc. Artist Frank Bender is making [has probably now made] a memorial sculpture dedicated to those who lay in the African burial ground, using facial reconstruction of 3 of the skulls to form the basis of the work. It will be put in the building that now stands on top of where the bones were found. The human remains are being put in coffins from Ghana and buried behind the building in the small portion of the African burial ground that still remains.